Coyne wrote:I suspect that is true because most people see bears as dangerous, and moose...not. Which is an incorrect assumption.

I'm really not sure how someone looks at a moose and doesn't realize it could kill them. A moose is what happens when bears and deer mate.

+1

commodorejohn wrote:I mean, anything with a large array of pointy objects on it is something you should instinctively know not to screw around with, let alone one the size of a tractor.

Actually, it has more to do with words like "feral" or "wild." I once knew a guy who picked up a "cute" adolescent (wild) cottontail bunny rabbit, which bit him. The teeth went easily through his leather work gloves and also all the way through the webbing between his thumb and first finger. Thinking larger, one has to be wary of the damage that can be caused by a thousand pound animal that can move all that weight at a run...even if damage is not intended. And then there's the diseases you can pick up....

Not to mention that virtually all animals will eat meat if given the opportunity. Deer actually are not herbivores; during mating season, to gather enough nutrients to grow the antlers, the males will look for bird nests in order to devour the baby birds, not to mention their willingness to scavenge carrion.

There's a certain amount of freedom involved in cycling: you're self-propelled and decide exactly where to go. If you see something that catches your eye to the left, you can veer off there, which isn't so easy in a car, and you can't cover as much ground walking.

jewish_scientist wrote:My general rule of thumb is anything half as big as you can kill you.

There's some microbes at the door that would like to have a word with you.

We're in the traffic-chopper over the XKCD boards where there's been a thread-derailment. A Liquified Godwin spill has evacuated threads in a fourty-post radius of the accident, Lolcats and TVTropes have broken free of their containers. It is believed that the Point has perished.

jewish_scientist wrote:My general rule of thumb is anything half as big as you can kill you.

Did you just confess your Kryptonite Factor? You can only be killed by something that's exactly half your size? It's certainly a strange weakness, but it could have its advantages. "Silly you, that was only 49.3% of my size - I'm completely unharmed!" "Curses!"

I'd heard stories about moose, but I didn't necessarily believe them until a friend described driving by an accident scene where a car hit a juvenile. He didn't see the moose, or find out what happened to it, but he saw what was left of the car.

j_s never said "only," so ... really ... that statement wasn't worth much, was it? We have to add a few tacit things to it to turn it into a thing worth remembering.

Of course, circumstances are everything, aren't they? Gloves or no gloves, a blue-ringed octopus entering your brain at supersonic speed would be no more or less deadly than a whale shark doing the same thing.

"Anything half as big as you can kill you" is equally as usefully interpreted as "Anything no more than half as big as you can kill you" as "Anything at least half as big as you can kill you".

In reality, pretty much everything can kill you, given the right circumstances, so "Anything less than half as big, exactly half as big or more than half as big as you can kill you" is an equally valid original axiomatic premise from which any and all more precise forms of JS's statement follows as derivatively true, so long as you don't need to start assuming "therefore !X=>!Y" out of thin air in any of those derivations.

jewish_scientist wrote:My general rule of thumb is anything half as big as you can kill you.

Did you just confess your Kryptonite Factor? You can only be killed by something that's exactly half your size? It's certainly a strange weakness, but it could have its advantages. "Silly you, that was only 49.3% of my size - I'm completely unharmed!" "Curses!"

I'd heard stories about moose, but I didn't necessarily believe them until a friend described driving by an accident scene where a car hit a juvenile. He didn't see the moose, or find out what happened to it, but he saw what was left of the car.

Yeah, moose are very bad for cars. A typical car is going to hit their legs, which will throw the body of the moose right through the windshield (although from my reading, more collisions are actually caused by drivers swerving out of their lanes to avoid a moose rather than actually hitting a moose).

When my brother and a good friend of ours moved up here to Alaska, they decided to drive. Our friend left Kentucky and picked my brother up in Wisconsin, and then they took Canada's highway west all the way to the traffic jam where a moose refused to move. Traffic on the highway was stopped for a few hours just because the moose wanted to be a dick and Canadians wanted to be polite.

If you like Call of Cthulhu and modern government conspiracy, check out my Delta Green thread.Please feel free to ask questions or leave comments.

"My rule of thumb, which is defined by Oxford Dictionary as a 'broadly accurate guide or principle, based on practice rather than theory' is that anything half as big as you or bigger can kill you."There, are you happy now.

Sableagle wrote:Half a big by what measurement? Length, height or mass?

Yes.

"You are not running off with Cow-Skull Man Dracula Skeletor!" -Socrates

I took it as you meant it, and it's still dumb. Did you skip over the various critiques?

There's a certain amount of freedom involved in cycling: you're self-propelled and decide exactly where to go. If you see something that catches your eye to the left, you can veer off there, which isn't so easy in a car, and you can't cover as much ground walking.